


The Bookmark Chronicles

by Valeris



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bookstores, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4359197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valeris/pseuds/Valeris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles in which the Avengers work at a used bookstore.  Tags and pairings will be added as they arise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Easy Mark

“Holy shit.”  Darcy whispered reverently.  “It’s a guy in a Mercedes Benz, and he’s bringing in a box.”

Clint set down the handful of mystery/thrillers he’d been alphabetizing and closed his eyes.  “Oh god, this is going to be  _so good_.  I love disappointing rich people.  It’s like a cool shower.”

“A cool shower of disappointment?”  Darcy said, just so that he could hear what he’d actually said.

“...Yes.”  He agreed, looking mildly pained.  “A cool shower of disappointment.”

“He takes a lot of those.”  Natasha corroborated, not looking up from her romance novel.  

“Walking away, with too much information.”  Darcy said over her shoulder, heading to the door to intercept Mercedes man.  He was wearing a really nice suit-- even the box looked like it might be worth something, made of some shiny black material that was definitely finer than cardboard.

Then she froze, because oh god, he was approaching Steve.  Steve, who was usually nice and always listened to everyone’s sob stories, until they’d had to tell him he couldn’t be one of the buyers anymore because he overpaid everyone.  

Steve, who had been moving boxes into the van all morning because some asshole from a donation center had brought in 140 boxes.  Who was still holding two of the heavier ones while Mercedes guy talked with his hands, and tried to add his box to the pile.  Through the glass door, Darcy saw an expression that was so foreign on Steve’s face that it took a moment for her to place it.  

He was  _pissed_.

It wasn’t that Steve didn’t get upset, but it usually took the form of ‘resigned annoyance’ or ‘righteous anger’.  Darcy’d seen him painstakingly sort through a hundred boxes to find a library book a woman had accidentally sold them.  He’d clock out and let someone keep browsing the shop for an hour after close.  And he was happy to do it!  He was the most tolerant man on the face of the earth, and somehow, this man had managed to piss him off.

Before he even opened his mouth, Darcy knew what Steve was going to do.

“He’s offering him a dollar.”  She whispered, plastering herself to the window so she wouldn't miss it.  Natasha set her book down on the counter with an audible thump.

“ _Steve_ is offering Mercedes guy a dollar?”  Natasha clarified, and when Darcy nodded she walked around the register to watch.

A dollar was what they offered women who tried to sell them a paper bag full of old bodice rippers.  Old men with a box of VHS tapes.  

 _Sometimes_ it was what you offered rich people, if they didn’t have anything good, but they always threw a fit.  

But… Mercedes guy did not seem to be throwing a fit.  He was grinning, and giving the white shirt sticking to Steve’s sweaty chest a long, appraising glance, and reaching into his pocket for a pen and a business card.

“He’s giving him his number.”  Natasha commented tonelessly, all of her surprise being expressed solely by her eyebrows.

“He is giving him his number.”  Darcy confirmed, watching Mercedes guy cop a feel as he tucked his card into Steve’s back pocket.


	2. A Perfect Mark

“Seriously,”  Darcy complained, hefting the last box onto the handtruck,  “Why is it always ‘these were my dead mother’s’?  Like, are they trying to deflect responsibility for their terrible literary choices, or do they think we’ll give them more money, or what?”

Jane appreciated the ‘we’, because Darcy was always the one who haggled.  “Maybe they really were their dead mother’s.”  Jane said, remembering all the old encyclopedias in those boxes.  

“Well, their dead mother should have bought better shit.”  Darcy said unsympathetically, tipping the hand truck back to wheel it towards the van.  Jane should have been helping her with the heavy lifting, but arguing with (potentially) grief stricken people over a few dollars always drained her.

 _I’m a restoration artist,_ Jane thought, putting her head in her hands,  _and I’m quibbling with old women about boxes of Encyclopedia Britannica from 1978._

It wasn’t that she didn’t know that she’d fallen from grace-- she knew.  It was just so much more glaring on days like this, when a lot of people came in to hock their ‘family heirlooms’ in the form of boxes of old penny dreadfuls.  She used to handle books that were worth millions, and now, she was down to this.  Mass market paperbacks that were, quite literally, a dime a dozen.  

Maybe it would have been less galling if she didn’t still think she’d been right about that book-- but it didn’t matter now.  She’d been fired, lost all her funding, because she’d been so sure that it was Asgardian.  

At least, since they’d decided it was a forgery, they’d let her keep it.  After all, it  _was_  worthless. (Or priceless.)

The movement of a car pulling into their loading zone caught her eye, and Jane tried to shake herself out of her stupor.

She immediately regretted making Darcy deal with the boxes, because the man that stepped out of the shiny green and black Viper looked rich, from his designer suit and slicked back hair to the thickly knit scarf that fell to his knees.  Like the sort of person who would want to argue.  

He smiled, and if it was meant to reassure, it failed.  He had a thin, sharp face that was handsome, but she couldn’t make herself find him attractive.  He put her off on an instinctual level.  “Hello.  Are you who I should speak with?  I have some things to sell.”

Jane got to her feet when he popped the trunk, and she was expecting to find a stack of blu ray, or some Sherlock Holmes.

She wasn’t expecting three boxes of her past.

They were  _beautiful_.  She’d never seen anything Asgardian in such good condition-- the binding was perfect, the gold gilding completely unchipped… they looked brand new, if such a thing were possible.

“ _Oh_ ,”  Jane breathed, tracing a hand over the Yggdrasill stamped into the leather cover,  “Sir, I-- You shouldn’t be selling these here.  We don’t… I’m not a book appraiser.  We don’t offer…”  Jane bit her lip, thinking of what her boss would want her to say, but-- she couldn’t let him do this.  “You’re not going to get anywhere near what something like this is worth here.  I’m not allowed to offer you more than a few dollars per box.”  Jane shook her head, imagining throwing something like this into the back of their van.  “You should take these somewhere else.  I can give you some numbers--”

“No.”  The man said, smiling with all of his teeth, and she rebelled internally from the idea that these lovely, wonderful things belonged to a man like this.  “That’s what I want.  Tell me-- what’s the lowest price you can give me?”

“I-- three dollars,”  Jane said faintly, horrified by the prospect.  “But, sir, these are worth--”

“Three dollars.  I think we can do better than that.”  The man mused, and for a moment Jane thought he would get offended and drive off with his artifacts-- but then he grinned again.  “How about a dollar?  Or, even better-- do you accept donations?”

“Yes, we do, but--Sir!”  Jane protested, trying to stop him from grabbing the boxes so roughly as he stacked them on the sidewalk,  “I can’t…  _please._ No one here’s going to know what these are.  If you donate them, we won’t have any of your information-- when you change your mind, it’ll be really difficult to find them again.”

“That’s exactly what I want.”  The man told her, and got into his expensive green car.  Before Jane could form another protest, he’d driven away, and left a fortune in antique books at her feet.

“Son of a bitch,”  Jane muttered, and got ready to do something that would probably get her fired.  At this point in her life, it was a Foster tradition.

 

Darcy opened the freezer and sighed.  “You threw away my ice cream?”

“I’m sorry, Darce, I’ll buy you more.”  Jane promised, sitting on the floor to draw another careful line through a piece of cardboard with her exacto knife.  “It’s too hot in here to leave them out.  When he thinks it over, I know he’ll come back for them--”

“And books need a ‘cool, dry, place’, and no direct sunlight, and you should never feed them after midnight.”  Darcy ticked off on her fingers,  “I got it.  You need help with your cardboard things?  It’s going to be a box to go around the book, right?”

“Yes,”  Jane admitted, ceding the task to Darcy gratefully.  “I need to finish wrapping these.  The freezer has moisture, so it’s not ideal…”

She knew Darcy had already heard much of this before, and didn’t care about half of it, but she let her talk anyway.  Darcy was good for that.  She understood more than she pretended to, but she always asked Jane to explain things in detail, because she knew that she missed talking about it.  The terms of art, the technicalities.  Jane mourned her lack of purpose, the way she used to feel useful.

For whatever reason, these books had found her, and she was going to keep them safe until… well.  

She was just going to keep them safe.

 

After the first year, Jane almost forgot that she was waiting for someone to come back for her books.  They were just  _hers._ The reason why she had to buy Darcy an ice cream cone whenever she asked for one.  She was saving up for a cold room to store them in, but for now, she rotated them from the freezer every three days to make sure they weren’t getting damp, changing the cardboard and plastic.

If it was late, and the temperature was low, she’d take them out to read.  It still felt a little clandestine, like she was handling relics she wasn’t supposed to touch, but Jane had slowly begun to feel like maybe he wasn’t coming back.

That maybe these were hers.

After the second year, Jane had built the cold storage room in her closet.  Darcy had spent a week eating ice cream for breakfast to celebrate, and Jane had started to spend more time reading her books, wearing one of Darcy’s wide infinity scarves for warmth.

She’d gotten comfortable, and complacent.

When he came, Jane was shouldering a box of paranormal romance novels into the van.  She didn’t leave it to Darcy anymore, although she still did most of the haggling.  It didn’t drag on her anymore the way it had in the beginning-- it was just a job, now.  Her life was something else.

He came on foot, in loose jeans with holes in the knees and shoes that looked like he’d walked in them a lot, the heels worn on the inside in a smooth curve.  There was nothing about him that should have made her connect him to that sharp man-- he was broad and well-muscled where he had been slim, casually dressed where he had been formal.  His smile was huge and genuinely friendly, and it made her feel warm instead of uneasy.  But she knew it was over-- her time pretending at having a purpose.  He walked towards the bookstore with the serious, intense expression of someone on a mission.  It wasn’t a look anyone ever had when they came there.  

“I ask your pardon,”  He hailed her from six feet away, his voice loud even at a distance.  “But I seek your assistance--”

“You’re here about the books.”  Jane blurted out, and then winced at the obviousness of that statement, because it was a bookstore.  “I mean, about-- two years ago.  The Asgardian books.”

He froze, that warm friendly smile dropping from his face, then lunged forward.  Jane almost flinched, but all he did was clasp her hands.

“You know of this?  I have been to so many places…”  He squeezed her hands, and Jane felt too aware of the fact that a man was touching her.  “Please, tell me-- do you know to whom they were sold?”

“I-- they weren’t.”  Jane admitted, and said a mental farewell to the last two years of her life.  “He said he wanted to donate them, that-- man.  But I thought, that had to be a mistake, that he’d come back for them.”  She swallowed.  “I kept them.  I still have them.”

The man’s hold became almost painful, but Jane didn’t want him to let go.  “Can you take me to them?”  He asked her solemnly, eyes boring into her so seriously and intently that there was really no other answer Jane could offer but “Yes”.

 

Darcy raised her eyebrows when they walked in, the spoon she’d been dipping into her pint of mocha chip gelato still lodged in her mouth.  

“Books?”  She guessed, and Jane wanted to be insulted that she’d assumed that she wasn’t bringing a man home on her own account-- except that she didn’t, and it was the middle of a work day.  Or maybe Darcy recognized the look on Thor’s (he’d introduced himself in the car on the way over) face as easily as Jane had.

“Thor, this is my roommate Darcy.”  Jane introduced, and Thor strode across the room to offer her his hand and one of his wide, warm smiles, even though she knew that he must have just wanted to get his things and get out.  “She helped me carry the books.”  Jane added, trying to give him a reason to care about meeting Darcy.

“What’s a little liberation of company property between friends?”  Darcy asked rhetorically, giving Thor a very obvious once-over.  “Especially for such a good cause.”

Thor gave her hands a squeeze of gratitude, and Jane suppressed the vague sense of jealousy it inspired, because it was absurd.

Her bedroom was obviously not prepared for visitors, and Jane kicked as many pieces of discarded dirty clothing under her bed as she could, knowing there was nothing she could do about the three glasses of water sitting stagnant on her nightstand, or the hook next to her closet that was full of winter clothes in the middle of summer.  Jane saw his eyes linger there, and she wondered if it spoke to her obsession, or if the cold storage closet would be evidence enough.  

 _It doesn’t matter what he thinks,_ Jane reminded herself,  _because he’s just going to get his things and leave._

Jane smiled at him, and opened the door to show him his books.

They were all laying flat on their own shelves, the leather still perfect and the gold just as shiny as it had been when his brother Loki had thumped those boxes down on the sidewalk.  Thor stepped inside the room, turning in a slow circle, until his eyes caught on the one thing in that place that was not perfect.

“That’s mine.”  Jane explained hurriedly, rushing to point at the book that he was staring at.  “It’s not-- I’ve been told it’s not genuine.”  She corrected herself, because even after all this time, she wasn’t willing to say that it wasn’t authentic.  “I used to do restoration.  They let me keep that, when they let me go, because they said it wasn’t real.”

Thor turned his stare on her, then reached forward.  In the cool air his touch was more than warm as he brought her hand to his mouth to kiss her knuckles, leaving the faintest trace of wetness on her skin.  

“I would stake my life,”  He told her seriously, still holding her hand,  “That it is.”


	3. Full Marks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True story: This happened five days in a row. The collection appeared to belong to someone else, but was sold to me by a very blase middle aged woman.

It would have been generous to say that Darcy was sweating.  Drops were rolling down her face, stinging her eyes and dripping onto the books she was loading into the boxes she’d stacked on the sidewalk.  She was melting.  She was dissolving into a pool of salt and water.

It was a sacrifice that needed to be made.

“Darcy?  Do you want me to move those for you?”  Steve asked, pausing in the middle of pushing a full hand truck of boxes toward the van.  Darcy leaned into the shadow he cast to savor the momentary reprieve from the sun, panting a little.

“No.”  Her voice sounded parched.  “I got this.”

“Are you sure?  You look a little… overheated.”  He said diplomatically.  Darcy knew what she looked like.  She looked like she was minutes away from laying down to die on the sidewalk.

“I  _got_ this.”  She insisted, clutching the half-full box to her chest in an attempt to conceal its contents, but it was too late.

“...Is this…”  Steve hesitated, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, and Darcy squinted up at him.  It was hard to catch his expression when he was standing with his back to the sun.

“Gay porn?”  She finished for him, and grinned.  “Yes.”

“All of it?”  He asked, staring at the stacks of books that lines the next six feet of sidewalk.

Darcy nodded happily, picking up her hair to hold it off of her damp neck while they talked.  “Nah, some of it’s science books, but I would say, like, 90% gay porn.”

“Some brought in… thirty five boxes?”  He guessed, and Darcy shrugged in agreement, “Of gay porn.”

“Yes.  And it is the greatest day of my life.”  She agreed, picking up another handful of photo books with naked men on the cover.  “Don’t take this away from me.”

Darcy let out a moan of dissatisfaction when Steve moved and she was pounded by the full force of the sun, and heard him sigh.

“Drink water.”  He admonished, popping the hand truck up onto its wheels easily.  “You sound thirsty.”

“I am thirsty,”  Darcy muttered, holding a magazine at arm’s length so she could get a better look at the cover model.


	4. A Grey Mark

“So, did I go into some kind of fugue state, or did one of you hack my Goodreads? Because I’m not saying I _wouldn’t_ read Fifty Shades of Grey, you know I love porn, but I don’t think I’d write in the review ‘My blood got pumping when he kept putting more and more thumbs in her mouth’.” Clint scrolled further down in his phone, trying to seem annoyed even as micro expressions of amusement flitted across his face. “I don’t even understand what that means.”

“It’s not ‘hacking’,” Darcy included physical air quotes, “If you leave yourself logged in.”

“There’s this scene where the author apparently forgot the amount of thumbs a human being has.” Natasha commented boredly from the corner where she was lounging. “Unless they recently changed it to four.”

“I’m noticing that neither of these are denials, which leads me to believe that you were both involved.”

“Do you think she went with the ‘e’ spelling to make him seem classier? Oh, my last name is vaguely British sounding,” Darcy paused to run a seductive hand down her the front of her shirt. “Doesn’t that turn you on?”

Clint snorted, not looking up from his phone. “You think ‘Grey’ is a stupid name, completely ignoring that the girl is named ‘Anastasia’.  That’s some weird princess fantasy bullshit right there.”

“Oh, no, it’s some weird eating disorder bullshit.” Darcy disagreed, her upper lip wrinkling. “Like, ‘Ana’ is one of the weird pet names pro-anorexia people call their personified idea of their disorder, and there’s that bizarre eating clause in their sex contract thing?”

“...I really thought that series couldn’t get more unpleasant to me, and yet, there are new depths.” Natasha observed. “Also you are surprisingly well educated about this for someone who doesn’t read erotica.”

“I prefer my pornography with pictures. And more men.” A passing customer turned to stare at her incredulously, dripping a spot of coffee on his shirt.

“Okay, this was definitely Darcy,” Clint decided, tapping his screen in triumph. “No one else would put my favorite quote as something from ‘Slammed in the Butthole By Linear Time’.”

Darcy looked down at her Space Raptor Butt Invasion shirt and sighed.  “Hoisted by my own petard.”

“That doesn’t make sense in this context.” Natasha informed her.

Darcy frowned. “Isn’t a petard like, a doublet or something?”

“It’s a bomb.” She and Clint replied in unison, then grinned at each other.


End file.
